GameSetLinks: Street Fighting, Art Boxing
[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]
Time to carry on with some GameSetLinks goodness, headed up by a great 1UP video special - and hopefully not the kind of thing there will be less of, post-UGO transition, given the costs and not always obvious returns of video content.
Also hanging out here - discussions of Sony and artsiness, indie games in New York magazine, a Proper Games profile, iPhone games sales stats (at least on the high end), and various other neatnesses.
Road to perdition:
1UP Specials: Street Fighter 4 with the Pros: News from 1UP.com
If you're going to do custom video, do it right, like this: 'We brought in three Street Fighter experts from Shoryuken.com, the community for hardcore Street Fighter players, for an hour-long video preview covering the new console characters (Gen, Sakura, Rose, Dan, Cammy), Challenge Mode, voice customization, strategies, and game mechanics.'
The Age of Indie Video Games - The All New Issue -- New York Magazine
'Unshackled from the blockbuster-or-bust mentality of the big corporations, these indie designers are ushering in a new golden age of smart, beautiful, and really weird games.'
Is Sony too artsy for its own good? - The Cut Scene - Video Game Blog by Variety on Variety.com
Completely agree, esp. if you look at investment vs. return for some of the PSN titles. Return is meant to be in prestige and hardware sales, of course, but... is it working?
Grey Alien Games » Blog Archive » Some Fantastic Indie Sales Stats!
Very useful discussion of what PC indie/casual folks can hope to make through selling their games online.
Flock and the art of downloadable game development | Technology | guardian.co.uk
Proper Games, I love the look of your game, but IMHO, you're scaled wrong in terms of project length/staff size for XBLA/PSN - the right size is 2-3 people plus contractors, I reckon. (I guess being privately funded and publisher-supported will let you get away with it, though.)
iPhone Savior: iPhone Developer Quits Day Job After 'iShoot' Hits Number One
Aha, single day iPhone sales to be #1 on store apparently confirmed: iShoot was the 'number one Top Paid App in the iTunes App Store with 16,972 downloads in one day.'
Comments
Well, despite (or because of?) our fairly big team size, we hope everyone enjoys Flock! when it comes out.
Also, it's worth mentioning that we've been developing our in-house tech in line with the project, so the timescale and overall cost is perhaps a little misleading.
Nonetheless, chuffed you love the look of it! :)
Posted by: Andrew Smith | January 20, 2009 2:59 AM
The Variety article is a nice counterpoint to the New York article.
Posted by: Chris Dahlen | January 20, 2009 7:04 AM
Hey Andrew - thanks for reading, and am definitely looking forward to the game.
A big team size isn't bad, as long as you can make a profit, so hopefully I'm incorrectly gauging average return for XBLA/PSN over time nowadays, yay.
Posted by: simonc | January 20, 2009 9:52 AM